Joseph Ross

My name is Joe Ross.

I'm a professor of medicine and public health at Yale.

We launched MedArchive, which is a preprint for the health and

June of 2019.

And we did it with a lot of planning and preparation.

We started working together with colleagues at Cold Spring Harbor Labs and at the BMJ more than a year before that, trying to plan and think about how this could be done.

While preprint servers were being used in other sciences, including biological sciences, it had never really gotten a lot of uptake in clinical medicine, in part because of concerns around the

And earlier dissemination of clinical research could maybe lead to misinformation or bad clinical decision-making or what if the research isn't right and people make decisions based on it.

So we put some things in place and some safeguards and guardrails and things like that.

And we were very excited.

We got it all up and launched in July.

There was a lot of enthusiasm for it and a lot of demand for it, but we could not have understood the implications of being up and running

when COVID, this pandemic that's now overcome all of our lives, we went from getting about 200 or so submissions a month to getting now between four or 500.

We get a lot of papers and it reflects the sort of where we are at in our understanding of the disease and it's evolving.

So when COVID first became recognized, what we were mostly getting were small case reports or case series or maybe

you know, an analysis of all the data from a single hospital ward.

And it was a lot of descriptive, you know, clinical epidemiology that would, you know, describe the patient sample, how they were treated, you know, how they did.

And then there were a huge number of modeling papers trying to calculate the R0 or the sort of infectiousness.

And now, you know, months have gone by.

You know, the first case in China was in December.